are not
mortal.
Everyone and everything stilled.
She flinched at the sudden, piercing attention. Blood rushed through her ears and the fluttering curtains laughed.
“Okhti?” Lana asked.
Zafira blinked. Kifah made a strangled sound, but the first to take a cautious step toward her was Nasir. As though Zafira were an animal he was afraid to startle.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” He looked at her as if not a single other soul existed on the earth.
She could not meet his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You—” Nasir started. “You referred to yourself as we. As two people. You said you aren’t … mortal.”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything.”
There was a sinking in her stomach. The five of them stared as if she were on some sort of stage, making a fool of herself. She stepped back toward the entrance, the long handles of the double doors curving into her back.
Nasir took a step closer. “Give me the Jawarat.”
“I don’t have it,” she lied. It was in her satchel; they couldn’t see.
“Zafira.” Nasir’s tone was meant for a disobedient child. “It’s in your hands.”
She looked down. Slants of light set the lion’s mane on the Jawarat’s cover ablaze. She tightened her grip around the book that had used her mouth to speak senseless words. Sweet snow below, what was happening to her?
She looked from Aya’s curiosity to Seif’s smugness, then to Kifah’s confusion and Lana’s worry, and finally to Nasir. It was the pity in those gray eyes that did it.
Her resolve fractured. Fell.
Leave them. Freedom rests beyond these doors.
Zafira threw open the doors and ran, recalling this same panic from when she raced through the oasis on Sharr. Wind against her limbs. Blood loud in her ears. Fragile sanity threatening to unravel.
She was ashamed that Lana had been there to witness it. Kifah, too.
“This is all your fault,” she hissed.
Stop.
Like a fool, she listened, stopping just beyond the gates of the house, and the reminder that she was in Sultan’s Keep hit her with a force. The cobble of hewn stone was warm beneath her bare feet. Sweet snow, the western villages of Demenhur were slums compared to this. It was a masterpiece of time and diligence, from the detailing on the ground to every carved bit of the sprawling houses surrounding her. Even the sky looked richer, the blue clear and vast. There was no difference between her and an urchin hiding in the richer end of the sooq. Her blue-black qamis, shorn from a dress that had cost one too many dinars long ago in Demenhur, felt like rags.
They—
“Stop,” Zafira hissed. “Don’t tell me anything.”
The sudden silence was filled with the Jawarat’s petulance and a guilt-inducing shame. Perfect. Shadows stretched, warning her that she wouldn’t be alone for long. Voices carried. Farther down the road, she could make out the stalls of a sooq tucked between buildings for shade, and the last thing she needed was for someone to demand who she was.
She hurried in the opposite direction, finding a small alcove created in the angle of space between three of the massive houses. Sunlight slanted within the confines of tan stone just so, illuminating an arch set into one of the walls and built of dazzling glazed tiles in hues of blue and red and gold, like a doorway to a hidden world. She stepped close, only to find it wasn’t a door but a fountain, a pool of glittering green water rippling beneath it.
It was beauty that felt delicate, a moment suspended out of time. Beauty she couldn’t appreciate.
“I don’t know why I listen to you,” she hissed.
The Jawarat didn’t answer, and Zafira pressed herself against the wall to collect her breath. A sand qit rose from its perch near the fountain, eyeing her with distrust.